Bernstein made West Side Story and led the Philharmonic
Leonard Bernstein, born Louis Bernstein on 25 August 1918 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, died 14 October 1990. The first American-born conductor to lead a major U.S. symphony, he directed the New York Philharmonic, composed West Side Story (1957), and taught a nation through televised Young People's Concerts.
Jewish immigrant parents Samuel and Jennie raised him; Samuel fled an ultra-Orthodox Ukrainian shtetl after draft pressure. Bernstein wrote across symphony, ballet, film, Broadway, opera, and piano. Civil-rights support, Vietnam protest, nuclear disarmament advocacy, and HIV fundraising marked his public life; he boosted teen Janis Ian's interracial-love song on CBS.
Recordings with world orchestras fixed his interpretive stamp. As educator-author-humanitarian he treated the podium as a civic platform, not only a baton perch.
Few Americans so thoroughly fused popular theatre, serious composition, and mass music education in one restless career.
His grandmother insisted his official first name be Louis, but his parents always called him Leonard, and he made that legal at 16; friends knew him as Lenny. His father grew rich through the Samuel J. Bernstein Hair Company and at first refused to pay for lessons after an aunt left an upright piano at the house when Leonard was ten, so the boy taught neighbourhood children to fund his own. Samuel eventually relented, and in May 1932 Leonard heard his first orchestral concert, the Boston Pops under Arthur Fiedler. He entered Harvard in 1935, studying with Walter Piston and Edward Burlingame Hill, and directed The Cradle Will Rock from the piano, winning Marc Blitzstein's friendship. At the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia he learned conducting from Fritz Reiner. When Gershwin died in July 1937, Bernstein, then a camp music counsellor, halted lunch to play one of his preludes as a memorial.
Source: Leonard Bernstein
